1. Field
This disclosure generally relates to a computing environment. More particularly, the disclosure relates to sampling technology.
2. General Background
Either time-based or hardware event-based sampling technology is typically utilized in application profiling tools to determine the specific usage of resources. A current approach is to sample by periodically generating interrupts. At each interrupt the current process/thread, the instruction being executed and, optionally, the data address being accessed, may be identified and recorded. At a later time the collected data is aggregated, and reports are generated showing sample distribution by address, symbol, process, etc. A variety of tools are based on this technology. The full execution context of the sample is not typically recorded and not available in reports.
Attempts have been made to improve this technology by getting call stacks at the time of the sample. The existing set of tools may either attempt to walk the call stack directly or invoke functions on a separate (sampler) thread to obtain the interrupted thread's call stack.